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Scotts Valley (CA) – A solid state disk (SSD) drive may be the sexiest mass storage device for notebooks and high-end PCs, but if it is about cheap storage the good old hard drive is still the way to go – and hard drive technology still has room to grow: Seagate today announced a new 3.5” drive that stores 500 GB on a single platter.

Just in time for CES, Seagate has begun shipments of its 12th generation 3.5” Barracuda hard drive, which continues to spin its platters at 7200 rpm. However, Seagate was able to increase the aereal storage densities of its platters, which reduces the number of disks and potentially power consumption as well.

Whereas the previous Barracuda generation used disks with a storage capacity of 320 – 375 GB, the new 7200.12 HD model increases the number to 500 GB per platter or a density of 329 Gb per square inch. That number is especially impressive if we remember than the industry believed that the natural storage density barrier would be about 100 Gb per square inch and even laser-assisted technologies would only reach to 250 Gb per square inch.

Seagate offers the new drives as 1-platter and 2-platter models providing up to 1 TB of storage, which is less than the maximum capacity of the 7200.11 drive that tops out at 1.5 TB (4 x 375 GB). At least in theory, the new platters would allow Seagate to come up with a 2 TB hard drive, which may be the case as soon as the company’s rivals are catching up with similar technology. There was no information on the power consumption of the drive, but we would expect the drive to consume less than the 4-platter 1.5 TB model and be in the range of the previous 2-platter 750 GB 7200.11 drive.

Seagate said that the new Barracudas are in production now and are offered in 500 GB, 750 GB, and 1 TB versions. The company did not disclose the suggested retail price of the drives.

It is amazing how much computer technology has advanced over the last 20 years.

A state of the art PC back in the mid 80's had a 4.7 MHZ cpu, 640K RAM and a 10mgb MFM HD.

The SATA drive prices have dropped like a rock and I'm going to add a 1TB drive to my desktop.

It is indeed amazing.The storage density,speed and capacity all increase while at the same time the physical size and price all come dowm !I wrote my first thesis application on 4k of memeory and had to do all of the hardware I/o's directly from the program !Now I have an whole operating system with runtime library, a full gig of execution memory and almost a terabit of disk storage all on a private machine at home .

What's scary is when those multiple terabit drives on home computers start getting full. I figure until we get a hd digital camcorder, 1 TB will last me for years. High quality and quantity media is the only thing that requires that much space.

Romans 6:18 You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness.

Differences between Obama and God: God's plan to save us is actually written down for people to read. Rush Limbaugh.

What's scary is when those multiple terabit drives on home computers start getting full. I figure until we get a hd digital camcorder, 1 TB will last me for years. High quality and quantity media is the only thing that requires that much space.

It will require a little discipline but as you say storage is cheap and falling.I have as a Christmas present a Cam-Corder with a built in disk that holds a bunch of family video's .From time to time they should be downloaded onto a achieve standalone with a bunch of free disk space.

As a mater of fact an offLine desktop with a Disk Farm makes a good stereo and video player able to play background music, family videos or movies and videos through out the whole house.I need to try setting up the Cam-Corder to record an on screen movie to check on the sound and video quality !I have a few of my favorites on the computer system ,Gettysburg and Amadeus but that's about the lot.It is actually a great way to manage household and property wide events when you are not at home and with the availability of inexpensive remote digital camera and proximity motion detectors to key them you have good security .

It is amazing how much computer technology has advanced over the last 20 years.

A state of the art PC back in the mid 80's had a 4.7 MHZ cpu, 640K RAM and a 10mgb MFM HD.

The SATA drive prices have dropped like a rock and I'm going to add a 1TB drive to my desktop.

Thirty years ago I was working for Honeywell as a Field Engineer. Some of the hard drives I maintained were the Hawk and Phoenix drives. They were the size of a small desk, cost 10's of thousands of dollars and were 5 to 10 MEGA Bytes. Yea, megabytes.

Thirty years ago I was working for Honeywell as a Field Engineer. Some of the hard drives I maintained were the Hawk and Phoenix drives. They were the size of a small desk, cost 10's of thousands of dollars and were 5 to 10 MEGA Bytes. Yea, megabytes.

Some of the original high density drives of those days weighed over five hundred pounds and held slightly over ten megabits.I remember the old core memory pages that IBM and Digital equipment used .They were the size of a seventeen inch flat screen monitor and about an inch thick.The way the industry is going we will all have 'Super Computers' on our desks and be able to process digital graphics at home like Pixtar is doing now with their Custom graphic engines that take up a large room .Here is the state of the art IBM Storage unit of the 1970's !"Its removable disk packs held 100 MB (404x19x13,030 bytes)."

The IBM 3330 Direct Access Storage Facility, code-named Merlin, was introduced in June 1970 for use with the IBM System/370 and the IBM System 360/195. Its removable disk packs held 100 MB (404x19x13,030 bytes) (the 1973 Model 11 featured IBM 3336 Disk Packs that held 200 MB (808x19x13,030 bytes)). Access time was 30 ms and data transferred at 806 kB/s. A major advance introduced with the 3330 was the use of error correction, which made the drives more reliable and reduced costs because small imperfections in the disk surface could be tolerated. The circuitry could correct error bursts up to 11 bits long. The 3330 was withdrawn in 1983.